Dashing Through the Snow

 

Who ends a ten-year marriage by text message? Not just any message, but a text message on Christmas from her husband of ten years with his pregnant mistress.

 

Brooke Payne knew her marriage was in trouble and she was preparing to bring the fire and passion back with a romantic Christmas Eve dinner with her husband Marcus, but he never came home again. Instead of getting Marcus, she got a text message telling her thanks for the good times, but he was moving on with one of his assistants who worked for the company he owned; a company Brooke, herself, had helped Marcus build from the ground up, while putting her own plans for a career on hold. She didn’t see his betrayal coming and didn’t know what her next move would be. She eventually had no choice but to move back home with her mother when she found herself completely broke, friendless, and living in San Diego alone in a house she could no longer afford. Back at home, she encountered Ian Samuels, the small-town hunk who only had eyes for her and who exuded more passion than she’d ever experienced with any man and that’s just from the way he looked at her.

 

Ian Samuels had to temporarily move back to his hometown to take over his father’s veterinary clinic after the elder Mr. Samuels succumbed to a heart attack, leaving the fate of the family clinic, which had been in operation for thirty years servicing their small Burlington, Iowa community, in jeopardy. What started out as a provisional location change started to look like a more permanent move when Brooke and her puppy, Dash, entered his life and for the first time in three years, he started to once again see the beauty of the Christmas holiday season through Brooke’s eyes when gazing in them stole a piece of his heart with each look.

 

Christmas hadn’t been the best holiday in the past for Brooke or Ian, but love doesn’t select specific seasons for it to be in full bloom, especially when the longing for a forever kind of love makes you want to stand still and stop running long enough to let the heart have what it wants.